Microsoft Teams to collect employee usage data

Prior to this, Microsoft launched the so-called productivity scoring tool, which can be integrated into some Microsoft office software suites to collect usage data of corporate employees.

Initially, Microsoft aggregated the usage data of each employee and then quantified the score, so that corporate managers would know the employee’s work status and work efficiency.

But obviously, this quantitative scoring technology is undoubtedly monitoring employees at all times, and then a large number of users questioned Microsoft’s use of digital technology to help companies monitor their employees.

Microsoft, which has been criticized, has made adjustments to quantitative scores mainly for anonymization, and now the productivity tool will no longer combine employee names with their monitoring data.

However, Microsoft is still collecting a large amount of data and summarizing it to corporate managers for viewing, and corporate managers can still use it to identify teams or specific employees.

ZDNet said that these are only a small part of the data, and there are many data such as device types, timestamps.

The raw data collected by Microsoft will be processed and then handed over to corporate managers. It may be slightly difficult for managers to directly judge the status of an employee.

However, these data can directly quantify the work status of a team or department and the corresponding scores. Then managers can interview an employee or even the entire team of employees.

Although a large number of users have complained about privacy violations, Microsoft believes that its products are fine, and Microsoft even gave a more formal response to questions from the media.

A Microsoft spokesperson said that the company also believes that privacy is very important, so only senior corporate managers can view and analyze data to gain insight into the team.

It is not clear how many companies have purchased Microsoft’s quantitative scoring tools, but it is believed that such surveillance activities will increase.